Larry D. Thomas lives in Alpine, Texas, with his wife, Lisa, and two Long-haired Chihuahuas, Pecos and Pinyon. He spends his days listening to the winds of the Great Chihuahuan Desert, and writing poetry. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, he has published eighteen collections of poetry, most recently A Murder of Crows (Virtual Artists Collective 2011) and The Red, Candle-lit Darkness (El Grito del Lobo Press 2011).

His Hard Art
in memory of Hart Crane

chose him and made him so facile
in the musical juggling of words
he could only speak in verse.

With his scalpel of perception,
in dissecting evil,
he stumbled upon the bones

of Lucifer, the Angel of Light.
It drowned him like a thrashing kitten
in the black well of consciousness,

leaving him the claw of his pen
to climb his way out, opening
his eyes wide and crazing them

with glimmer. But the sheen of oil
spilled on the sea in the sun
was enough to kill him.

Voices

Late at night, in the candle-lit
stillness of the sanctuary,
far beneath the steep,
slated pitch of a roof
so high a sky looms blue
beneath it, she genuflects.

She and she alone
knows they’re all still there,
each and every one,
penetrating her crystalline heart
like lasers ricocheting
ad infinitum

off stained glass, stone and oak,
each prayer prayed
and each hymn sung
for hundreds of years,
whooshing through her soul
like swallows.